Women and Retirement: Reflections from the Field

Retirement often closes the door on a chapter in one's professional life. How can women emotionally, physically, and financially prepare for the transition?

By Judith Glazer-Raymo

Women Confronting Retirement: A Nontraditional Guide

A Woman's Education: The Road from Coorain Leads to Smith College

When Baby Boom Women Retire

Retirement has a ring of finality, signifying that a door is about to close on a productive, remunerative time of one's life. For professors, it may also mean giving up tenure and thus the assurance of continuing employment in their professional field. In 1987, the U.S. Congress amended the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, eliminating mandatory retirement for most American employees. Academic institutions were given another seven years, until January 1, 1994, to adhere to this provision so that they might modify their policies on faculty retirement.

In his 2002 book, Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much, labor economist Ronald Ehrenberg observes that few institutions used that seven-year hiatus to address potential problems arising from the end of mandatory retirement, particularly its impact on hiring and the tenure system. Still, evidence is accumulating that colleges and universities are using early retirement packages that rely on incentives such as monetary buyouts, mortgage allowances, pension contributions, health benefits, and lifetime use of facilities to encourage faculty to give up their tenured positions. Not surprisingly, although these packages are typically gender and race neutral, most fail to address the psychic realities of moving from full-time tenured positions into more transitory phases of life.

The effect of this failure and other shortcomings of the current retirement system fall especially hard on women. Over the past quarter-century, women have benefited from changes in social-security and pension-vesting requirements and, most recently, from passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which makes it possible to obtain up to twelve weeks of personal leave without penalty. The AAUP's annual report on the economic status of the profession, however, shows continued gender inequities in the salaries of women faculty compared with those of their male colleagues. Such inequities diminish women's pensions and their chances of economically stable retirements, as do the persistence of gender discrimination in employment and the erosion of Social Security and Medicare. For women who head their households alone, the chances decline further.

Baby Boomers

Management consultant Nancy Dailey has written a thoughtful, well-researched little book on how these issues are affecting women from the baby-boom generation—those born between 1946 and 1964, who are projected to begin retiring in 2010. Her work raises many questions about the economic aspects of women's retirement planning.

In When Baby Boom Women Retire, she expresses concern about how economic, social, and political changes in American institutions will impact the retirement security of most of the baby-boom women now in the paid workforce. Using 1990 as a benchmark, she draws on federal census data, population surveys, statistical reports, and research on retirement to analyze women's retirement prospects.

Dailey notes that 80 percent of all baby-boom women with five or more years of college are now in the labor force, and that women are altering the composition of the workforce in occupations that men have historically dominated. To address these developments, she calls for changes in the analysis of retirement policies and practices, rejection of the traditional male-defined model "based on a linear design which assumes a cause-and-effect relationship between work and retirement," and new ways of measuring the ramifications of retirement policies. She comments at length on what she views as the chaotic condition of current retirement research, focusing on three structural variables: population aging, labor force participation, and retirement income sources.

A trend toward retiring at earlier ages over the past fifty years means that by 2005, the median age at retirement will be 61.2 years for women and 61.7 years for men. The net effect of these earlier retirements, combined with greater longevity among retirees, will be "a significant expansion in the number of years and the proportion of Americans' life spans spent in retirement," Dailey writes. Based on data projections, many baby-boom retirees will be married, educated, have uninterrupted work histories, high earnings, and own their home. Some of the risk factors Dailey cites for women, in addition to the possible privatization of Social Security and Medicare, include marital instability, single parenting, and disabilities, each of which will mean differences in women's retirement patterns. Her treatise is sobering, given continued evidence of salary inequities, age and sex discrimination, and inadequate health insurance.

In light of this evidence, Dailey asserts that the "existing blueprint for retirement" should be reconsidered, taking into account new family structures, disparities in women's and men's labor-force experience, women's historical role as caregiver, and outdated assumptions about sources of retirement income.

Dailey addresses baby-boom women in all employment sectors. Human resource specialists in colleges and universities as well as higher education policy makers and advocacy organizations can therefore draw on her analysis to engage in a discourse about the structural elements characterizing women's labor-force participation, and how these factors will impact the economic and social future of women faculty of the baby-boom generation.

Personal Perspective

Attention to the subject of women's retirement is gaining strength from a new genre that rejects the traditional perspective of social gerontologists in which aging signifies decline in one's physical and mental capacity. The articles and books published in this genre emerge from the narrative memoir tradition in which women reflect on their life experiences and view retirement as an opportunity to take charge of their lives, free from routine constraints that no longer challenge their emotional or intellectual capacities.

Feminist Betty Friedan was an early proponent of this genre. She rejects the "fountain of youth" mystique that equates age with decline and "restricts our thinking about real possibilities of continuing to grow and develop after fifty, sixty, seventy." Although I am not, strictly speaking, reviewing her 1993 book, The Fountain of Age, I want to draw attention to its chapter on the "retirement paradox." In this chapter, Friedan observes that—in a society that equates prestige and power with occupational status and income—women who achieved "personhood" at the height of the women's movement now face challenges similar to those of men in sustaining productive lives.

Friedan writes about the authenticity of age, emphasizing the importance for women of autonomy in making personal choices and writing their own stories. Her book is steeped in psychological studies and interviews with more than a hundred women and men, covering virtually every aspect of the aging process. Written in her sixty-fifth year, the book artfully interweaves Friedan's personal and professional journey with anecdotes about friends and acquaintances who have sought fulfillment in later life. She criticizes gerontologists who have seen aging as a problem and despairs of the difference between how society constructs older adults and how we see ourselves.

Women who came of age during the women's movement and were in the vanguard of women entering the professional work force in large numbers have written several celebratory books, reflective memoirs, and first-person narratives that re-think retirement as a personal journey. These women assert that the personal may be political, but it is also professional, and that, to quote the poet Robert Browning, "the best is yet to be."

Deliberate Choices

For Women Confronting Retirement: A Nontraditional Guide, academic administrators Nan Bauer-Maglin and Alice Radosh invited thirty-eight women with different life experiences, who had held professional positions for at least twenty years, to reflect on the changing meaning of work in their lives and the issues raised by their decisions to retire.

The editors acknowledge that the contributors are a self-selected sample of women who are nevertheless diverse in age (thirty-three to eighty-six years old), race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and career choices. Several of the women are former or current teachers or administrators in academia. Others have been or are union organizers, corporate executives, or self-employed professionals. What unites them are the economic, political, and cultural obstacles they overcame. Many were the first in their families to work outside the home, rejected traditional models in shaping their careers, and made deliberate choices in planning for retirement.

The editors divide the volume's essays into three sections. The first is about women planning for retirement; the second focuses on women in various stages of retirement; and the third is about those who vow never to retire, because they cannot afford to, do not have to, or do not want to close the working chapter of their lives. Their stories focus on the distinctive issues of retirement for women who have equated paid work with being taken seriously and with a social commitment to the public sphere.

Those who are about to take the plunge worry about the loss of professional identity and structure in their lives, the instability of their finances, and the replacement of professional priorities with personal demands on their time. Acting teacher Carol Prescott wonders how she can replace her relationships with her theater students and determines to design a teacher-training course, work with an acting group, finish a book, and "pray every day that I remain healthy enough to continue as long as possible."

Four women, in different stages of retirement, write collaboratively about the stresses of living on fixed incomes. Yet they express an essentially feminine obligation to offer their services as consultants and mentors in social change projects. Family therapist and teacher Donna DeMuth asserts that it is time for her to move on from writing scholarly papers to writing in a personal daily journal. This journal will be "free of the constrictions of academic/professional disciplines" and include elements of several narrative genres, "a scrap-bag quilt in a free-form design." English professor Sylvia Henneberg and literary gerontologist Barbara Waxman echo poet May Sarton's journals in which Sarton vows to live out her life with intensity and passion. Women's studies professor Ellen Rose comments on other women writers who have reflected in their books that aging is a time for growth and exploration, not for dying and despair.

A poignant essay by English professor Phillipa Kafka relates her feelings of low self-esteem following her retirement as a tenured faculty member. She writes: "Yet whenever I thought of myself as retired, as a retiree, as in retirement, it still meant to me the step prior to death: the loss of functioning in the world, the loss of service to the world, being out of it." But then she resolved to reconceptualize her attitude toward her past, present, and future lives, admitting to herself that her retirement had been triggered by boredom with her high-status faculty position, and that she had "consciously manipulated the ageist stereotype" for her own purposes. After she reconsidered her attitude, she was able to begin a career in house restoration, while also continuing to write and publish literary criticism. She concludes that confronting the stereotypes we have internalized in our training and our work makes it not only possible, but also sensible, to be productive members of society.

In a particularly insightful essay, Catholic nun Carole Ganim writes about her decision to leave her religious community after sixteen years to become a teacher in a small rural college. Married and in the early years of her retirement, she consciously reflects on her new persona in the context of family, community, religion, and profession, drawing sustenance from her freedom to choose different pathways to fulfillment.

In reading Bauer-Maglin and Radosh's book, I am reminded of two others. The first is The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty, published in 1998, in which the late English professor Carolyn Heilbrun writes about her decision to retire from her tenured position at Columbia University. She describes how her writing productivity increased following her departure, at which point she was unencumbered by professorial and family responsibilities. The second book of which I am reminded is the 1996 book Getting Over Getting Older: An Intimate Journey by journalist Letty Pogrebin, who admonishes older women to speak out and write about their experiences, serving as role models to a younger generation.

A Woman's Education

One educator and writer who offers women a beautifully written and valuable trilogy of memoirs about her life is Jill Ker Conway, who served as president of Smith College between 1975 and 1985. Her stories benefit from her ability to blend the personal and the professional in a conversational style that is highly readable and engaging. They also extend our knowledge of the problems that women confront in assuming the mantle of academic leadership at a time of considerable political ferment, and in dealing with new challenges throughout one's life.

In A Woman's Education: The Road from Coorain Leads to Smith College, Conway continues a narrative begun twelve years earlier with The Road from Coorain, the 1989 account of her childhood on a sheep ranch in the Australian outback, in which she writes about her decision to study nursing in Sydney followed by her acceptance into Harvard University. In True North, the second volume of this autobiography, published in 1994, Conway continues her academic and personal saga, relating vividly her experience pursuing a PhD in history at Harvard; her marriage to a Harvard professor and housemaster, John Conway; and her first professorial appointment at the University of Toronto.

Her assertive and determined stance as a junior faculty member in the history department at Toronto enabled her to prevail in a tenure and salary-equity dispute with her department chair. She also fought for subsidized day care and other benefits for women, gaining the attention of a new president, who invited her to join his cabinet as vice president for internal affairs. She was the first woman to hold a senior post at that university. Conway conveys her ambivalence about leaving the classroom for the conference room, the challenges of administrative life, and governmental budget cuts that made it difficult to fulfill her goals of recruiting more women faculty and developing new services for women students.

The third volume of her memoir, A Woman's Education, begins with her decision to assume the Smith College presidency in 1975 and her arrival in western Massachusetts. She was not yet forty years old, the college's first woman president, having attained a goal that many women and men aspire to—a college presidency at one of the most prestigious and well-endowed liberal arts colleges in the northeastern United States. She relates the challenges of winning over entrenched male faculty members, responding to student demands, working with trustees, and shaping her vision of a single-sex college in the highly charged atmosphere of post-Watergate America.

Accustomed to working in public universities, she recalls the challenge of restoring equilibrium to the college's endowment. She acknowledges that she was accustomed to referring financial matters to the experts, "having left the management of my own retirement funds to the venerable Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association."

Her support for women's studies, women's athletics, and women in leadership positions elevated her to the public role of articulate spokesperson for women's advancement. She recalls with bemusement that among the powerful male leaders in corporate and political circles with whom she met, changing the segregated workforce and giving women opportunities to learn and advance over a lifetime was viewed not as a productivity issue but as a transaction in a zero-sum game.

Because of her outspoken support for women as productive, contributing members of society, her decision to retire from the presidency in 1985 at the age of fifty was a shock and disappointment to many women. She explains in the last chapter of the book that her decision not to seek another presidency came as she felt herself circling between inner happiness and personal tragedy. Her troubles included the declining health of her husband, the deaths of her mother and of her niece, whose guardian she had become, and the realization that she was approaching the age at which her father had died. But the main reason for her retirement seems to have been "an intense longing to live in another self."

She wanted to be creative rather than managerial, to write poetry rather than memoranda to the board of trustees. In her words: "I seemed suddenly to have arrived at a point in life where the role of universal caregiver was no longer tolerable. I was impatient with endless meetings, less amused by student and faculty foibles, and sure someone new could do a better job." She describes herself as happy and lighthearted after she informed the trustees and the faculty senate of her decision.

And yet when she ponders her future, she describes moments of "sheer panic" about life without a sheltering institution and with writing as a main activity. She acknowledges that the classic transition for presidents of liberal arts colleges is to move up to the next rung on the presidential ladder by running a university. Although the invitations and nominations materialized, she decided that fifteen years in administration was sufficient; she wanted "to shift gears." She admits that despite her many successes as Smith's first woman president, she had become disillusioned with professional scholarship and the culture wars dominating the humanities at the time she relinquished her post. She determined that the next phase of her life would be spent outside institutional boundaries, with her work divided into writing about women, studying environmental issues, and serving on boards.

Since 1985, Conway has written and edited several books, including three collections of women's memoirs: Written by Herself; Autobiographies of American Women (1992); Written by Herself: Women's Memoirs from Britain, Africa, Asia, and the United States (1996); and In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States (1999). In a series of 1998 essays on the art of autobiography, When Memory Speaks, she observes that "the need to examine our inherited scripts is just beneath the surface of consciousness, so that while we think we are reading a gripping story, what really grips us is the inner reflection on our own lives the autobiographer sets in motion."

These memoirs demonstrate that in thinking about retirement, women may be motivated by many factors. The stories also show us that we have much to learn from a lifespan perspective on the aging process. They heighten our awareness of the problems women continue to confront in balancing personal and professional experiences and the importance of mobilizing networks of support that will enable them to lead productive lives in retirement. In the end, the memoirs, stories, and socioeconomic studies of women approaching retirement can help us redefine institutional and public policies and the interstices between work and retirement in addressing women's needs and concerns.

Judith Glazer-Raymo is adjunct professor of higher and postsecondary education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and retired professor of education at Long Island University. She is the author of the 1999 book, Shattering the Myths: Women in Academe.

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